Critics of U.S. Rep. Todd Akin's cuckoo comments on rape and abortion have put, to borrow a line from comic Mike Myers in "View from The Top," the wrong em-PHA-sis on the wrong syl-LA-ble.

We already knew that some conservatives, mostly men, are super skeptical when women say they've been sexually assaulted, so I wasn't surprised that in a TV interview Sunday, Akin referred to "legitimate rape" while defending his opposition to a rape exception in abortion laws.

A legitimate rape, the thinking goes, requires that the sober and modestly dressed victim claw and holler in protest. It helps if she's attacked by a stranger; otherwise, the assault might be rape-ish, but it wasn't a rape-rape.

No, what stunned me was the word "ways" as employed in Akin's rationale.

The gentleman from Missouri, who faces incumbent Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill in November, explained himself Sunday on the St. Louis Fox affiliate thusly: " … From what I understand from doctors, that's really rare. If it's a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down."

I have only myself to blame for not reading the manual that came with my sacred flower, but I digress.

Akin has since back tracked, but only because of the firestorm.

After all, he attributed his understanding to medical professionals, who I pray had no hand in teaching reproductive science to his six home-schooled children and eight similarly schooled grandchildren.

Since his unfortunate decision to stroke the back of his throat with his pinkie toe, Akin has been asked to drop out of the race by a growing number of high-profile Republicans, including presumptive GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney and his running mate, Wisconsin congressman Paul Ryan, both of whom were totally BFFs with Akin before they told him to kick rocks.

A defiant Akin told them to stick their demands where the sun don't shine, which brings me back to women's nether regions.

Is it possible that women come equipped with cervical stop signs? Or internal versions of the spiked strips that police use to flatten tires of a getaway car?

If women have an internal kill switch, do we risk deactivating it if underage and sleeping with a much older man?

Might my va-jay-jay have other powers? With enough concentration, could I shut down a nuclear power plant? Stop traffic? Or Lysistrata style, end the Republican-led war on women?

Akin now blames his ill-chosen words on bad data. "Rape is just rape," he's since said.

But that doesn't erase his or Romney's ties to Dr. Jack C. Willke, who birthed the theory that rape is so stressful that the woman's body would reject any pregnancy.

Romney bragged about Willke's support during his 2007 president bid, decades after the good doctor's 1971 book that outlined his noxious rape hypothesis and simultaneously diminished the effect of this horrible crime.

It's estimated that 1 in 6 women will be the victim of a sexual assault in her lifetime and 60 percent of rapes go unreported. Resulting pregnancies — more than 32,000 each year, according to one study — aren't rare.

Most Americans — even those against abortion — support an exception in case of rape.

That puts Akin outside of mainstream public opinion but he has plenty of company. This isn't an isolated off-the-cuff remark, but rhetoric rehearsed by scores of Republicans.

But because the right's hatred-for-all-things-Obama-and-Democratic, Akin is still electable.

On Twitter Tuesday, Akin blamed the liberal media and liberal elites for his recent tribulations.